


κατάβασις

by liesmyth



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drugs, Gen, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 16:06:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20473790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liesmyth/pseuds/liesmyth
Summary: Henry Winter was the king of the Underworld, for all that he certainly didn’t look like it.





	κατάβασις

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychomachia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomachia/gifts).

> In Greek mythology, the _katàbasis_ is the convention of the hero journeying to the Underworld.

The pills were red and shiny and slightly oblong, about as little as my smallest fingernail, slightly oblong, and they promised to open your mind to a wilderness of wonders. They had caught on quickly among the stoners and hippies of Hampden, and from there they’d spread to the whole student body like wildfire. The hippies were calling them ‘pomegranate seeds’, and the first time Francis heard about it he laughed hysterically.

“Wait until Henry hears about it,” he said, and then sobered up immediately. “Unless… you don’t think he’s got something to do with it, do you? What happens if you _take_ one of those things? Jesus.”

He shuddered, looking mildly panicked. We all went out of our way not to talk about Henry, not _like that_, but sometimes there was no helping it — the realisation would sink in again and we’d share a stunned look across a room, a choked whisper, the chilling terror of humanity confronted with the divine.

Just last week, deep into his third brandy of the night, Francis had slammed his hand angrily on the table loud enough to make all of us jump, shoulders shaking. “I can’t believe we went along with it,” he’d said, looking accusingly from Camilla to Francis to myself, even though I’d had no part in the ritual and hadn’t even learned about the whole affair until it had been far too late. But I would have, had Henry asked. We all knew that.

“Well, I don’t think Henry would bother with something like that,” I said, here and now, to Francis’s pale face. “Though I bet he’ll find it hilarious.”

Henry did. I told him myself, a few days later, in his big cavernous apartment that was always so full of shadows. I came over a few times a week after class, because despite everything we knew about him now I missed Henry and couldn’t manage to stay away from him. The others all thought I was insane — they were skittish around him still, and Henry wasn’t pushing it. And then there was Bunny; but the less said about him, the better.

When I told Henry he laughed, deep and heartily, in a way that brought to mind the rustle of wind through autumn leaves. “_Pomegranates. _Well.” Then he looked at me. “Aren’t you going to ask me if that myth is true?”

“I…” Every morning, in the Lyceum, as we read through our Greek I was keenly aware of Henry’s presence at my side, impassible and beatific. All manner of questions had been rattling inside me, my lips itched with the weight of unspoken words, but I’d never dared to.

“Ask,” Henry said, imperious, and so I did.

“Is it? I mean, how much of it—”

“Not all of it,” Henry conceded. “It’s not about the fruit, obviously. It’s about the ritual of it, offer and take, and being in debt…” He grinned wickedly, and once again I thought of Bunny. “You know, Richard, I don’t remember everything myself. I have been mostly human for years, and human minds— your memories, have a fuzziness to it that…” He trailed off. “It’s mostly come back, of course. But not all of it.”

When Henry had been a child — a human child, or mostly so, wide-eyed and as fragile as any of us — he’d had some kind of terrible accident. I remembered Bunny telling me: ill, bedridden, the blinding headaches.

“I don’t get headaches anymore.”

I nearly jumped.

“Sorry.” The corner of Henry’s mouth rose into a half-grin, more amused than apologetic. “I guessed. I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I _could_, but believe me, you certainly would notice. It wouldn’t be pleasant.”

Henry rummaging through my head, with his mind as sharp as his keen gaze, was something didn’t bear thinking about. Instead, I thought about Charles’s drunken words from the other night and said, “You knew what would happen. When you took the others into the woods.”

“I should have taken you as well.” Henry mused, taking me by surprise. I felt slightly uneasy and unexpectedly flattered, filled with a sudden warmth that made me squirm where I stood.

“I regret it, now. It would have been intense, no doubt. You are a man of strong convictions, Richard.” I glared at him, but weakly, and Henry laughed.

“But to answer your question, I wasn’t wholly sure. It was more instinct than rationality, I can tell you that. I thought ‘If this ritual works, I’ll be one step closer…’ and I couldn’t remember to _what_. It was very frustrating, he said. But then the farmer came along.”

“They killed for you,” I said accusingly, thinking of Francis’s pallor and Camilla’s haunted look.

“It wasn’t as deliberate as that. But yes, they did,” Henry said. He spread his arms and gave a mocking bow of the head, and I felt cold wind caress my face. “And here I am.”

And then Henry said, “Say, don’t you happen to have some of our Hampden pomegranates along? In your pocket, maybe?”

I did, in fact, though I kept them in my bag. Henry had asked, but the tone of it suggested that he knew the answer already — that I’d gone to Judy across the hall and scored a handful, and tried a couple just that morning, swallowing them dry. The buzz had been great, but not supernatural.

“It’s just pills,” I said. Then I thought about Francis’s spike of paranoia and frowned. “Right?”

“Oh, relax,” Henry said. “Come on, let’s see it.”

He waited expectantly, and I couldn’t deny Henry anything. I rummaged around in my bag until I found the flimsy plastic, and shook it until three of the things rolled into my palm. I stretched out my hand, an offer.

“Interesting,” Henry mused, his fingers circling my wrist. We both stared at the gleaming pulls in my palm, small and innocuous, and not at all like the real thing. I thought Henry would take them himself, but I was surprised when his other hand closed around mine instead, curling my hand into a fist. His thumb was tracing small circles over the pulse point at my wrist, and his touch was cold.

“Will you?” He asked, softly. His eyes bore into mine, keen and ancient from under his round lenses, and the contrast was disconcerting — the abyss between Henry as I’d first met him and the being I now knew him to be, ancient and ageless. My hand trembled under his, shaking slightly, and Henry let go of his hold. It fell open; the pills were still there, the ambrosia of the modern age. He plucked one between thumb and forefinger, then held it against my lips.

“Open,” he said, still with that same dry amusement. “It’s better if you take it from my hand.”

My mouth had opened before the full weight of Henry’s words had reached me. There was a glass against my lips, and I swallowed on reflex — red wine, heavy and sweet — then spluttered.

“Henry,” I said.

“Richard,” he echoed, mockingly. The hand that had been touching my wrist moved up to my shoulder, then my neck. He stroked my cheek with the back of his fingers, in a way that was as jarring as the weight of the years behind his gaze. Henry, the _old_ Henry, before the ritual and the farmer and everything that’d come with it, would never have touched me like this. He’d been an awkward young man in his magnetic way, studious and quiet, and if he’d caressed my face like this I would have laughed and shaken him off, and not thought much about it at all.

Instead, I shuddered.

“Another,” said Henry, and once again he fed it to me gently, as if it were a culinary delicacy and not some synthetic molecule I’d bought off Judy to get some buzz. Again he gave me wine to drink with it, rich and heady and sweet like nothing I’d had before, even though there were no bottles around and I was sure he hadn’t been holding a glass when I’d first walked into the room.

Then he did it again, and the third pill and third mouthful of wine went down more easily than the others had. I felt warm all over and shaking like a leaf, and Henry’s cool hand on my face was like an anchor in a sea of sensation. The room had a fuzzy look to it, ink-black shadows creeping from the corners, bright spots of multi-coloured lights dancing over the lamps, odd shapes where a book or a vase might have been. It was far too early to be this buzzed, I thought, dimly, and then I had to close my eyes tightly as the world swayed around me.

“I told you it’d be better if you ate from my hand,” Henry whispered.

I fought against the mounting haze. “Will it—” My throat was dry. “Is it doing anything? Did you _do _anything? To me.”

“Only what your mind thinks it’ll do,” Henry said. “They’re pills, Richard, not seeds of the Underworld.”

The way he said it made it sound ridiculous. But the taste of sweet wine was in my mouth, and I’d once seen Henry blight the ground under his feet just by standing there, solemn and inexorable, and around him all the bushes and ferns and every last blade of grass turned brown and died. And then there had been the farmer, and Bunny… I only saw Bunny in class these days, scared and cowed and always eager to disappear as quickly as he could, sweating with nerves every time he and Henry were in the same room. But he’d stopped making noises about telling anyone, or joking about it, or— it was as if his tongue got tied up in his mouth every time he thought about saying something Henry wouldn’t like.

_Bought and paid for_, Henry had said once, and I thought dimly about old coins and treasures of the Underworld and resolved to never let myself be in Henry’s debt if I could help it.

“You’re thinking too much,” Henry said, breathing into my ear.

I blinked, turning my head to look around the room. There was a small print on of the walls, cheap and faded and not Henry’s style at all, and as I stared it seemed to magnify and turn to life. Big yellow sunflowers emerged from the black-and-white landscape, red poppies and burnished wheat, wildflowers dancing in from of my eyes before crumbling into dust.

I squinted. “What’s that?” I asked, tripping on the words.

“Time.”

A chandelier that hadn’t been there earlier swung wildly from the ceiling, casting flickering golden light. In the corner, a grey figure flashed and disappeared.

“You’re seeing things that aren’t here,” Henry said. “Bits of the Underworld bleeding through.”

The room felt chilly, or maybe it was just Henry’s touch. I swallowed. “What it’s like?”

There was a long pause. Then Henry laughed, just as warm and amused as he had earlier.

“So you _are_ asking about it,” he said, sounding proud. “You’d like to keep me company in my misery, is that it? Or do you just want a glimpse of what’s forbidden to mortal eyes?”

“Er.”

Once, months ago, I’d seen a picture of Henry and Bunny at school some years ago, wearing matching haircuts and matching glasses, Henry’s eyes blinking unfocused at the camera. It was an awkward picture, the kind grandmothers coo over and friends tease you about, and I thought about boy-Henry then and Henry’s voice in my ear just now, talking about seeds of the Underworld and knowledge forbidden to mortals. I shook my head and that only made the room spin worse, and soon it was only Henry’s hand around my shoulder keeping me upright.

I let him urge me over, guiding me to lie on the old leather couch. I liked the way it smelled, comfortable and rich. Henry’s cold hand was stroking my hair and I sighed into his shoulder.

“Maybe I’ll take you sometimes,” Henry was saying. “Not just now, you’re high.”

_Take where?_ but I knew it, of course. I forced the words through my dry throat. “‘m not high. It’s only been teen minutes since—”

“You’re high. I gave those to you myself.” The way Henry said it, he made it sound obvious that his presence would make a difference. The floor lamp in the corner cast a kaleidoscope of colours all over the floor, and under my eyes the hardwood floor seemed to come alive, twitching and flowing like the current of a dark river.

“You’re seeing the water, aren’t you?” Henry asked. “That’s good. That’s the first step.”

_The first step_. But I knew the answer to this question too, without asking — there would be many steps to come, steeper and further, down into Hades.

I closed my eyes, and Henry’s arms closed around me like an iron grip.


End file.
